We talk of the internet as digital infrastructure; but we leave the building of rails and roads to the quasi-monopolistic platform providers. Decentralised architectures provide a number of advantages: They are potentially more inclusive for small players; more resilient against adversarial events; and seem to generate more innovation. However, it is not well understood how to evolve, adapt and govern decentralised infrastructures. This article reports qualitative empirical research on the development and governance of the Beckn Protocol, an open source protocol for decentralised transactions, the successful development of domain-specific adaptations, and implementation and scaling of commercial infrastructures based on it. It explores how the architecture and governance support local innovation for specific business domains, and how the domain-specific innovations feed back into the development of the core concept The research applied a case study approach, combining interviews with core members of the Beckn community; triangulated by interviews with community leaders of domain specific adaptations and by analysis of online documents and the protocol itself. The article shows the possibility of such a decentralised approach to IT Infrastructures. It analyses the Beckn Protocol, domain specific adaptations, and networks built as a software ecosystem. Based on this analysis, a number of generative mechanisms, socio-technical arrangements that support adoption, innovation, and scaling of infrastructures are highlighted.

翻译：我们将互联网视为数字基础设施；然而，我们却将构建"轨道"与"道路"的任务交给了准垄断性的平台提供商。去中心化架构具有诸多优势：它们可能更有利于小型参与者参与；对对抗性事件更具韧性；并且似乎能催生更多创新。然而，关于如何演进、适应和治理去中心化基础设施，目前尚未得到充分理解。本文报告了一项关于Beckn协议（一个用于去中心化交易的开源协议）的开发与治理、其特定领域适配的成功发展，以及基于该协议构建的商业基础设施的实施与扩展的定性实证研究。文章探讨了其架构与治理如何支持特定业务领域的本地创新，以及这些领域特定的创新如何反馈到核心概念的发展中。本研究采用案例研究方法，结合了对Beckn社区核心成员的访谈；并通过访谈特定领域适配的社区领袖，以及分析在线文档和协议本身，进行了三角验证。本文展示了这种去中心化方法应用于IT基础设施的可能性。它将Beckn协议、特定领域适配以及基于其构建的网络作为一个软件生态系统进行了分析。基于此分析，研究强调了一系列生成性机制，即支持基础设施采用、创新和扩展的社会技术安排。